Building a Winning Production Team
Manufacturing is a team sport. You need to leverage the unique strengths of every member of your team to build a WINNING TEAM and succeed in the fast-paced and dynamic world of precision manufacturing. When everyone (and thing) is set up for success, you will be amazed at what can be achieved.
The Production Team
Your People bring creativity, problem-solving skills, and a deep understanding of the manufacturing process to the table. They are the innovators who are always looking for ways to improve. They are also the troubleshooters who keep the production line running smoothly. It is important to encourage open communication and create a culture where your people feel valued and heard. Empower them to voice their ideas and tackle issues head on. The most important thing your people need to do their jobs well is accurate information. Share information with the team around their performance, revenue goals, profits, and costs. They need to understand how the shop functions to see the important part they play. Listen to a podcast from someone who built an outstanding company culture here, especially from timestamp 36:15.
“If you expect your employees to help you make more money in your business, and they don’t understand how your business makes money, why are you asking them to help you?”
—Jack Russell, Owner, Rolar Products
Your CNC machines are the only source of accurate data on uptime, downtime, shift performance, part quantity, and program details. Having access to this real-time data is crucial to optimizing overall production performance. The trick is getting all that valuable information out of the “black box” and into a format that is usable by your team. The best way is to pull data directly from the controllers so that you don’t burden people with trying to count parts or input reason codes for why a machine is down.
Your Machine Monitoring process is the bridge between your people and your machines. How you measure your production performance matters a lot. Manually gathering data from every machine, every shift, every day is the most basic process. All the information has to be aggregated, analyzed and displayed so that the team can use it to improve performance. The obvious flaw with the manual process is that it can only look at what happened in the past, and you can’t change that. The best you can do is plan to do better in the future. Automating your production monitoring is the only way to provide the accurate data your people need. Overstating the importance of having the right data to support your decisions is impossible.
“There’s so much data, but how do you collect it efficiently and make good use of it? I think that’s definitely one area that I look back on and think, man, lost opportunities because we weren’t organizing the data well, so we weren’t able to plan as effectively as we should have”
—Hernan Ricaurte, President, Ricaurte Precision Inc.
Automating Your Production Monitoring
Datanomix Production Monitoring Software gathers and analyzes production data directly from your machine’s CNC controllers—with no operator input required. Real-time and historical insights are displayed across mobile devices, TVs, and computers so your team can make the best decisions in the moment. It empowers them to quickly intervene when something goes wrong, which reduces downtime and boosts overall utilization.
The key to building a winning team is to recognize the strengths of each player. Your people bring creativity and problem-solving skills, they shouldn’t have to gather and input data that your CNC machines can supply faster and more accurately. And automated production monitoring software can analyze data and display insights in real-time that would be impossible for people to duplicate. When each player is focused on what they do best, you will have a powerhouse team capable of achieving your revenue and profit goals. Go team!
Looking for more inspiration?
Subscribe to the Datanomix Manufacturing Mavericks podcast to hear from manufacturers who are embracing the best tools and technology to showcase world-class manufacturing and grow their businesses.
